Analysis

BBC Sport and The Orange Ledger on Manchester City: the prize money agrees to £0.1m, the totals do not

BBC Sport counts £844m for the nine seasons of the commission's finding. On the same nine seasons, with no rate applied, we count £501.6m. The League prize money in the two counts agrees to £0.1m in total and club by club. The rest differs because the two counts ask different questions: the BBC includes relegation and cup finals, we follow every European place down the table and leave relegation out.

By Arthur van de Laak13 October 2026Updated 25 October 2026 · View updates8 min read

13 October 2026.

Two counts of the same nine seasons, published a day apart. Where they agree, where they differ, and why.

On 12 October we published Take Manchester City out of the table. On 13 October BBC Sport published its own count, “How much did Man City’s rule breaking cost your team?”. Both start from the same finding: on 29 September 2026 an independent commission found Manchester City in breach of the Premier League’s financial rules across the nine seasons 2009/10 to 2017/18. City have appealed, and sanctions have not been decided.

The BBC’s total is £844m. Ours, for the same nine seasons at the amounts paid at the time, is £501.6m. The £1,921.3m in our headline is a different figure: seventeen seasons, carried to 2026 at 5% a year.

The two nine-season totals are not rival answers. They share one component almost to the pound, and differ on what else to count.

1. The part that agrees

Both counts move every club that finished below City up one place, and give it the League’s payment for one place.

The agreement holds club by club, wherever the BBC prints a club’s figure:

The BBC’s sections on Everton and Liverpool give the same sum as £10.6m; its section on league places gives £10.7m.

Both also count the same 35 clubs over the nine seasons. Paul Quinn at The Esk published the first version of this sum on 30 September, at roughly £187 million.

This checks the arithmetic. It does not show that any club would have finished a place higher: both counts take the published tables and payments as they stand, so they should agree, and they do.

2. What the BBC counts and we do not

Relegation is the largest line, and it is not in our count at all. For each club that finished 18th, the BBC takes what the bottom club earned from the League in the following season and deducts the first year of parachute payments. Hull City went down twice from 18th, so Hull has the second-largest figure in the BBC’s list at £99.0m. In ours Hull has £5.2m, which is the prize money alone.

We left relegation out because it needs one more assumption than moving a club up a place: that the club in 18th would have stayed up. Our article lists it under “not included”. The BBC’s figure is also income, not loss: a club that stays up pays Premier League wages. The BBC says its article is not an estimate of compensation.

Cup finals are the other line we do not have. The BBC asks what a beaten finalist might have earned in Europe had it won the cup City won.

Take relegation out and the two totals come much closer. The BBC’s remaining count is £494.3m, against our £501.6m. They are still not the same thing: the BBC’s includes the cup finals, and ours values more European places, by a different method. But most of the £342.4m between the two headline figures is one decision, whether to count relegation.

3. How the two counts treat European places

Every European place, down the table. The BBC counts Champions League places missed, and Europa League places for some clubs: Everton, it says, finished one place short four times. We follow the whole chain. When City’s row is removed, the club in fifth takes a Champions League place and gives up its Europa League place, which passes to the next club, and so on. We follow that chain to its end and count each club net of the place it left. Our European figure for the nine seasons is £313.3m at the amounts paid at the time.

How a place is valued. The BBC values a missed Champions League place at what City earned from the competition in the following season, less the Europa League money the other club received. We use what UEFA paid the club that actually held the place, in that competition and season, from UEFA’s financial reports; for 2025/26 and 2026/27, which UEFA has not reported, an estimate. Neither is a forecast of what the other club would have done.

For Tottenham the two routes now come apart: £119.9m at the BBC for all its lines, £82.0m in our count (£6.7m of prize money and £75.3m for European places), because each place Tottenham gain is valued at what UEFA paid the club that held it, not at what City earned.

Eight more seasons, and a rate. We also count something the BBC does not attempt. The BBC stops at 2017/18 and adds no interest. We show 2018/19 to 2025/26 separately, as an assumption and not a finding, and carry each amount to 2026 at 5% a year, with the same count at other rates beside it.

4. The figures side by side

The BBC also reports what City themselves were paid in the nine seasons, including £363.4m from the Champions League. That is City’s whole income from the competition. The £36.5m in part 2 of our series, for 2010/11 to 2017/18, counts only UEFA’s payments for going through a round, so the two are not the same measure.

5. What neither count is

Neither is a claim for damages. In June 2026 a Premier League panel awarded Burnley compensation against Everton, and to do it the panel first had to find that the breach caused Burnley’s relegation, and then rebuild four years of Burnley’s own cash flows (PLJP 2023/3, decision of 2 June 2026; Everton is appealing). Neither the BBC nor we do that for any club here.

Both counts show what was at stake in a league place, a European place and, in the BBC’s case, a relegation place. Where the sum depends only on published tables and payments, the two counts get the same answer. Where it depends on what a club would have done with a place it never had, the answers differ, and they should be read with that in mind.

More on the Manchester City caseThe ruling, what it could cost City, and what it cost the others→

Sources: BBC Sport, “How much did Man City’s rule breaking cost your team?”, as published on the morning of 13 October 2026, for every BBC figure above. The Orange Ledger’s figures are from part 1 and its published method; the nine-season figures with no rate applied (£501.6m, £188.3m, £313.3m and the club figures) are from the same model and are printed here for the first time. This is a count from public information. It is not a claim that any club is owed anything, and it is not legal or financial advice.